The New C Standard

As seen on Slashdot: “At a very late stage Addison Wesley decided not to publish my book, ‘The New C Standard: An economic and cultural commentary’ […] I am making the pdf freely available. You can download the pdf (mirror). The organization is rather unusual in that the commentary covers each sentence of the C Standard (actually the latest draft of C0X, excluding library) one by one (all 2022 of them).“

Slashdot has original content. They have interviews, book reviews, and less than subtle product placements. There are also the misleading summaries, misleading headlines, and editorial comments that follow submissions. There’s also the content that is the entirety of the submissions accepted and published.

Well the pdf is way too big to digest before this story is gone, but since I am working on a non std C compiler, the additional insights here will be usefull in resolving implementation issues besides those in older C std books.

couldn’t care less about slashdot having been the source

2005-07-09 12:32 am

I saw the same item on theinqurer.net, something like a couple of weeks ago. To the best of my knowledge, there were the first to receive this news, directly from the author of that book.

Does anyone care about this? I can’t imagine myself ever having the time, or interest, to read all of that commentary.

2005-07-10 1:21 am

When it comes to a standard, something that’s admittedly beyond dry, commentary is very important. You might read a clause, but fail to grasp all its implications, or even how it affects your own code. The standard is intended to be terse and accurate, commentary like this is very important.

2005-07-09 12:49 pm

I know it’s an extraordinary good book.The book should be used according to the author from subject to subject rather then from page1 to the end.

2005-07-09 2:18 pm

didn’t finish downloading

2005-07-10 9:35 pm

Anyone know where I might get an html/chm version? No, not google’s crappy translation. Frankly, unless I’m going to print this, a pdf is just clumsy.